Binance To Undergo 8-Hour Scheduled Maintenance: Possible Price Manipulations Ahead?

The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by means of traded volumes is about to enter into scheduled maintenance on March 12th at 2 AM UTC. That’s according to an official system upgrade notice.

Per the release, Binance is going to suspend deposits, withdrawals, as well as trading throughout this period. Those deposits which haven’t been completed before the start of the upgrade will be processed once the process is completed. Additionally, the exchange asks users to allow some time for these deposits to be effectively reflected in their accounts once the upgrade takes place.

The announcement also revealed that the entire system upgrade is going to take approximately about 8 hours but that estimate may vary.

As Cryptopotato reported in the past, scheduled maintenances of major cryptocurrency exchanges are an excellent opportunity for Bitcoin price manipulations by whales. Hence, traders don’t want to stay out of control and find their positions forced liquidation at the time Binance will be back online.

While it’s unclear what the upgrade is about, Changpeng Zhao, CEO at Binance, tweeted that it’s “big” and that users funds are SAFU.

Big upgrade. Funds are #SAFU. https://t.co/0LVZ3iZUU4

— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) March 11, 2019

Binance’s SAFU

As Cryptopotato reported last summer, Binance went through a bizarre incident when a single Syscoin, which at the time was worth about $0.25 was purchased for 96 Bitcoin (around $615,000 back then). The incident prompted the company’s risk management system which discovered that it was caused by a number of API users.

Following the happening, Binance halted trading and withdrawals and quickly removed API keys until the situation was resolved. The exchange offered a 70% rebate on trading fees for over 10 days and created the so-called Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU).

SAFU is a dedicated fund which receives 10 percent of all trading fees on the platform. It is designed to offer additional protection to the exchange’s users in extreme cases.

Binance Coin (BNB) Hold Steady

Despite the ongoing maintenance, Binance Coin (BNB) has managed to remain steady and held the gains made during the last week.

At the time of this writing, BNB is trading at $14.60 according to data from CoinMarketCap, marking a slight increase of about 1.6 percent on the day.

It’s also worth noting that Binance recently announced the newest fundraising event which will be held on the Binance Launchpad – the Celer Network.

The Celer Network sale will take place on March 19th exclusively on Binance Launchpad and users will only be able to purchase CELR tokens using BNB.